From the South Florida Sun-Sentinel

He don’t use jelly

Avant-garde artist Matthew Barney uses Vaseline … and Björk. A documentary captures it all.

by Bob Weinberg

December 6 2006

Aboard a Japanese whaling vessel, conceptual artist Matthew Barney and his musician girlfriend, Björk, sit on the floor of the tearoom. As the space becomes flooded with a thick, oozing substance, they start carving each other's legs with flensing knives, instruments used to remove blubber from whales. The couple eventually transform into whales themselves.

What exactly is the 38-year-old Barney, best known for his avant-garde Cremaster films, trying to say with Drawing Restraint 9, his first feature in four years? "That's a good question," says filmmaker Alison Chernick, who chronicled the making of Drawing Restraint 9 in her new documentary, No Restraint. The film, which will screen Saturday in Miami as part of Art Basel, has been picked up by IFC for distribution and will open Dec. 20 in select cities.

"His work is so layered and complex, and clearly he has a strong vision, but it's very much centered on biology and fantasy," Chernick explains. "The Drawing Restraint series is focused on restraint and the removal of restraint, and both imposing restraint and resistance and taking it away. So the whole documentary really focuses on this concept and his explanation of it."

The work also functions as a metaphor for the six-year relationship between Barney and Björk, the Icelandic pop icon whose view of the world seems as singular as Barney's. Chernick emphasizes, however, that Drawing Restraint 9 is not a collaborative work but Barney's vision featuring Björk's acting and music, which has also been released as a soundtrack album.

Chernick, whose previous work has included television documentaries on U2 and the visual artist Jeff Koons, first approached Barney with the idea of doing a film about the Cremaster series. However, Barney had no interest in revisiting Cremaster, as he had already moved on to his next concept. The artist then told Chernick about his new project, which was going to be filmed aboard a whaling ship off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan. It would feature, among other things, 45,000 pounds of petroleum jelly -- Barney's preferred sculptural medium -- and involve traditional Japanese rituals. When Barney invited her along to chronicle the proceedings, Chernick jumped at the chance.

"Part of the attraction was being able to follow a project from inception to execution," she says. "So I knew that I would actually have a film because I could really get into his mind and sort of watch where he takes us and this whole journey from the start."

Chernick also got to see the reactions of the puzzled Japanese whalers aboard the Nisshin Maru, who opened their world to the idiosyncratic artist and his significantly strange significant other. The filmmaker says she came away from the experience with respect for the 18-to-20-year-old fishermen.

"There may have been a bit of confusion," she says, "but total willingness. They were incredibly helpful, and they helped Matthew out a lot. They completely got what was happening. It's just baffling to see anybody fill a ship with 40,000 pounds of petroleum jelly. … I don't think they understood the art, as most people wouldn't [while] watching the process, but it was very interesting to watch."

Not everyone agrees about Chernick's respectfulness of the Japanese whalers. "We see the fishermen shrug their shoulders and say they have no idea what any of the strange things they're seeing are all about," writes Ian Buckwalter on the blog Dcist.com. "Chernick plays these moments for laughs, setting up the whalers as rubes and philistines, and missing the opportunity to ask some important questions. For instance, while it's hard to deny the importance and thought-provoking nature of the artist's work, at what point does its lack of accessibility begin to erode its impact?"

While Barney has sparked international interest beyond the narrow confines of the art world, critics have vigorously debated his merits. He has been hailed as "the most important American artist of his generation" in The New York Times and had his work dismissed as "masturbatory" and "superficial foolery" by the Village Voice. While clearly of the former camp, Chernick would rather let the art -- and the artist -- speak for itself in her film than impose her own critical point of view.

"He sort of creates his own language," she explains, "and it was interesting for me to go in and try to demystify it and understand it and sort of break it down and try to figure out what he is saying and how he is saying it and try to present it to an audience.

"He definitely has a large following," she continues, "so I think the documentary should answer a lot of questions for people, just sort of follow the process of someone I think people are sort of mystified by."

No Restraint will screen 9 p.m. Saturday at the Colony Theatre, 1040 Lincoln Road, in Miami Beach, followed by an 11 p.m. afterparty with filmmaker Alison Chernick at the nearby Delano Hotel pool bar, 685 Collins Ave. Admission to both is free but by invitation only to ArtCenter/South Florida members on a first-come, first-served basis. Membership in ArtCenter/South Florida costs $30-$40. To join, call 305/674-8278 or visit Artcentersf.org.